Off to explore a quartier which has greatly changed since we lived in Paris. The formerly industrial neighborhood is now home to a cultural-educational-flower-filled park edged with spiffy apartment towers, and the 19th century stone wine warehouses now accommodate shops and restaurants. It’s an easy walk across the Seine to the four controversial towering volumes of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, today packed with students cramming for the Bac.

Columbus Day is an opportunity to ponder immigration, an especially rich subject during the current election season. The image below, created for this holiday, is part of the all-media Op-Ed exhibit at the Art League Gallery at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia. Come to the opening reception October 13th for a look at a range of opinionated work.

So fittingly on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we listened to many touching, fascinating, and funny reminiscences during the moving celebration of Al Bronstein. This is a man who infused all his life’s undertakings—from social justice to education to family life to fabulous cooking—with his fierce determination, courage, brilliance, humor and kindness. Thank you, Al.

Gaulish, Greek, and Roman civilizations intersected in this region, as we were reminded on a rainy Sunday spent among their sculpture, tools, and pottery, rescued by 20th-century divers from two-thousand-year-old Mediterranean shipwrecks, and now installed in the stunning Musée de l’Éphèbe in Cap d’Agde.

On this day in 2013, we were wandering the fairy-tale streets of Sarlat, a Périgord village of golden limestone, remarkably unchanged since the 16th century, and I sketched the birthplace and childhood home of Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563), of which this is a detail.

Today is the day in 1620 on which the passengers of the Mayflower came ashore at what would become Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts. I had learned in elementary school about Plymouth Rock—the boulder onto which the Puritans supposedly first stepped—and assumed it was symbolic or even mythological. But on a family trip to the area some years ago I was taken aback to find along the shore an actual Rock enshrined in a mini-temple. Thus the entry that day (featuring the Standish/Alden trio) in my sketchbook. Happy Plymouth Rock Day!